Panama News Briefs

Adames nomination rejected
On June 21 the Legislative Assembly, by a vote of 36 to 31 with four abstentions, rejected President Moscoso's nomination of Rommel Adames to be a member of the Free Trade and Consumer Affairs Commission (CLICAC). The main reason was his request to the Electoral Tribunal for a list of PRD members working at CLICAC, so that he could fire them. The tribunal refused his request, a lot of PRD members were fired anyway, and when the Legislative Assembly was taken over by a PRD-Christian Democrat alliance Adames's nomination was doomed.

Mireya appoints Panama Bay cleanup coordinator
President Moscoso has issued a decree that creates a coordinating unit for efforts to clean up Panama Bay. The Health Ministry, the IDAAN water and sewer utility, Panama City's and San Miguelito's sanitation departments, the National Environmental Authority and a number of other governmental entities all have responsibilities touching the pollution problem in Panama Bay. The person now in charge of coordinating their efforts is Laurencio Guardia, who was a vice minister in the housing and public works ministries during the Endara administration. The post falls within the Health Ministry in the governmental organization chart.

Eisenmann quits
Presidential advisor I. Roberto Eisenmann, the former publisher of La Prensa, resigned his post on July 3. He had alleged that a group of "maleantes disguised as businessmen" is surrounding the president, and had done so with past presidents, to the nation's detriment. Moscoso partisans who deny that there is corruption in the current administration demanded that Eisenmann identify the objects of his criticism, which he declined to do. The president expressed dismay at Eisenmann's departure, while Second Vice-President Dominador Kaiser Bazan agreed that some of the people around Moscoso have done harm to her administration.

Singares investigated
Immigration Director Eric Singares, who gained notoriety for his summary extra-judicial deportation of his Nicaraguan maid over a pay dispute, is now in trouble over his heavy-handed procedures. The Supreme Court has ordered a criminal investigation of Singares for summarily putting alleged Chinese swindler Weng Wong on a plane ultimately bound for China, despite the court's granting of a writ of habeas corpus in the case and a magistrate's prohibition of the deportation. Weng now faces a possible death sentence in China for allegedly running a $50 million Ponzi scheme.

Arguments over circuit funds
The executive branch has been withholding funds to be spent in the legislators' circuits, more or less at the deputies' discretion, as provided in the national constitution and as has been the practice in the past. This has led Christian Democrat legislator Teresita de Arias to charge Economy and Finance Minister Norberto Delgado with theft, and fellow Christian Democrat deputy Ruben Arosemena, who is likely to be the next president of the Legislative Assembly, to threaten that as long as the funds are held up, the legislature will block all nominations and proposals made by the Moscoso administration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has held that part of the legislature's package of circuit fund reforms is illegal - the legislature can't pass a law prohibiting the reduction of circuit funds from one year to the next, because that would usurp the executive branch's role in the budget-making process.

Bocas land dispute gets rough
When businessman Mario Guardia's cattle-raising business, Ganaderia Bocas, escalated a long-standing property dispute with the Ngobe community of Santa Marta Abajo in Changuinola district by fencing off part of the contested real estate, his employees were confronted by the men of the community who, armed with machetes and axes, slaughtered 13 cattle who were grazing on land the community claims as communal indigenous property and distributed the meat among Santa Marta Abajo's 2,500 or so residents. Authorities arrived on the scene and separated the angry residents from the also angry company employees, arresting a company foreman for disrespect. Guardia claims that the land does not belong to the community, but to the national government, and that he has a concession to graze cattle on it. A few days after the confrontation the national Agrarian Reform office ordered his company to stop its efforts to fence the land.

US releases embarrassing documents
In recent weeks the US government has declassified a number of old documents that have raised some political hackles here. Most notably, El Siglo's Michelle Lescure obtained records that indicate that the late General Omar Torrijos was on the CIA payroll from when he was a young officer in 1955 until he took over the government in 1969. Torrijos received $25 per month and the occasional bottle of liquor or carton of cigarettes in exchange for providing unspecified information to the US government. Other documents indicated that the Carter administration was concerned about unconfirmed stories of drug trafficking by the general and members of his family at the time of the Panama Canal treaty negotiations. PRD leader Martin Torrijos, the general's son, angrily denounced the documents' release.

TI rates RP
Using three different polls of business owners and foreign investors, Transparency International has given Panama a 3.7 on the 10-point scale of corruption. A score of 0 would accrue to a totally corrupt and opaque country, while a perfectly open and honest jurisdiction would get a 10. Panama was tied with Mexico for 51st place among the 91 countries rated. The TI ratings found Finland the most honest and open place to do business, and Bangladesh the most corrupt and least transparent country.

Banco Hipotecario raided, Arrocha forced out
The state-owned home loan bank, the Banco Hipotecario de Panama, was raided on June 26 by agents from the Electoral Prosecutor's office who were searching for evidence of special favors to members of the MOLIRENA party. The bank's general manager, MOLIRENA activist Waldo Arrocha, was forced to resign two weeks later. The bank's privatization or abolition is one of the demands that international lenders have made of the Panamanian government.

Kunas attack police station
On July 5 a group of men from the Kuna Yala community of Mulatupu attacked the local police station, routed the cops on duty there, overturned a police boat and took 24 kilos of cocaine from the station, which they claimed that they burned. The assailants said that drugs seized in or near their communities end up back on the black market. In the days that followed several alleged attackers were arrested.

Bernal honored
Although Attorney General Jose Antonio Sossa wants to have him jailed for blaming police for allowing four grisly murders at Coiba a few years ago and Government and Justice Minister Winston Spadafora wants to take him off the air because his doctorate is in law rather than journalism, France likes law professor, activist and radio show host Miguel Antonio Bernal's journalism. At a recent ceremony at the French embassy, Ambassador Patrick Boursin presented Bernal with the Palme Academique, making the professor a member of the elite "Violet Legion" that Napoleon created to honor outstanding intellectuals. High among the reasons for which the honor was bestowed upon Bernal was his work as the Panama correspondent for the prestigious French newspaper, Le Monde Diplomatique.

Acquittals in murder of Canadian businessman
On June 30 a jury found that four men and three women accused of murdering Canadian businessman Scott John Barton, who was shot in the parking area of his Obarrio apartment building in 1995, were not guilty. The prosecution only produced four witnesses, including two who said they got fleeting glimpses of people who looked like some of the suspects near the scene of the crime, one who was a physician who confirmed the cause of death and one who was a detective who explained why he thought the defendants were a gang that botched an attempt to steal the victim's Rolex watch. The jury wasn't convinced, and the accused, after spending more than five years in jail awaiting trial, were freed.

Teachers complain of assaults
Public school teachers in the Darien recently came to the capital to express a number of complaints about the conditions in which they must live and work, and according to La Prensa, those grievances include assaults by armed Colombian intruders. One teacher said he and a Ministry of Education driver were ambushed and beaten by bandits when they tried to ford a stream in the Santa Librada area, and other educators told of being assaulted and robbed by such gangs. Though intruding left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries get the most attention from the press, the Darien is also frequently victimized by ordinary criminal gangs who cross over into Panama from Colombia.

Autopsy denied
Relatives of Augustina Rios, one of the cancer patients who received an overdose of radiation at the Instituto Oncologico Nacional, complain that their requests for an autopsy after her June 16 death were ignored. The family wanted to know if she had died from cancer or from the radiation, but they say that the hospital denied their request for an autopsy and ruled that the death was a result of cancer.

Foster to be tried
Dr. Steven Foster, a Dalton, Georgia physician who ran Corazon a Corazon, a charity that operated on the impoverished Caribbean coast of Honduras, will be tried on July 17 in the Seventh Penal Tribunal in Ancon on charges of Crimes Against the Patrimony. In 1999 Foster's group, which had planned to open a vocational school in Honduras, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in surplus property from the departing US Southern Command. The US Embassy, which was feuding with SouthCom over disposal of the surplus at the time, had the Panamanian Public Ministry seize much of the property on the grounds that Corazon a Corazon wasn't a genuine charity. After long investigations in the United States, no criminal charges were brought against Foster or his group, but a Southern Command board of inquiry found that, since the group had used a surplus landing craft to ferry commercial loads to areas of Honduras cut off by Hurricane Mitch, it had violated its promise to use the property it received for only charitable purposes. Meanwhile, the Panamanian authorities left a warehouse in Betania that contained much of the property unguarded and some of the items disappeared. Now prosecutors in this country allege that by receiving property from the US Southern Command, Foster stole from Panama. Foster, who has been living in Georgia, says he will voluntarily come to Panama and defend himself in court.

Madriñan released to house arrest
The former head of the now defunct National Investigations Department (DENI), Nivaldo Madriñan, has been released from prison to house arrest after serving 12 years of a 20-year sentence for various human rights abuses, the most notorious of which was the disappearance of Father Hector Gallego. The erstwhile secret police chief has been suffering from a kidney ailment that was aggravated by the harsh prison conditions he had to endure since being arrested in the 1989 US invasion.

Quarter-million taken in bank heist
Four assailants in two cars robbed the Banco Bilboa Vizcaya on the Transistmica of about $250,000 on July 9. The robbery was the most spectacular act in a crime wave that has accompanied Panama's economic crisis, and it came a day after the Moscoso administration announced a new anti-crime strategy that includes a $10 million increase in the police budget.

also in this section Paramilitary supply operations in Panama uncovered The Bush administration's policy in our region The Andean Regional Initiative and Panama Uncle Sam's mercenary contract Preservationists target Fort Randolph
©2001 The Panama News